9 reasons why the new Apple iMac Retina is well worth its price tag, and how Microsoft’s Surface Book makes the perfect case for it.
Most recently, Mac sales set a new record, reporting 20.6 million Macs sold over the past financial year. Also, all of this happened during what is still being perceived as an extended PC sales downturn.
When looking back at previous years, this is most definitely a non-news, however, it’s still baffling how some still try to make the case that Macs are overpriced.
The misguided notion that the Apple iMac Retina is overpriced, is about to be debunked, once again. However, this time, this point is driven home by a Microsoft product in direct competition with Apple’s own desktop offerings.
Before delving into each of the ten important reasons why Macs, and more specifically the latest iteration of the Apple iMac Retina, are worth every penny, let’s talk about what’s happening in the consumer computing world.
Consumer computing is a commodity that, like many other types of commodities like it, requires manufacturers to consistently compromise, between quality, performance and user experience, in order to satisfy the widest possible array of audiences, by keeping prices low, and overhead lower.
The simple truth, especially when it comes to the least successful products on the market, is that there is only so much that can be compromised on, between quality, user experience and performance, before users start complaining, regardless of how low the price tag is set.
In most cases, the biggest complaint from consumers who purchase a lower-quality product is that it’s simply “slow”, which is something of a realization which consumers begin to perceive typically within the first three months of owning a product. This is due to the psychological effect of buying something brand new and shiny, taking it out of the box, powering it up, and being excited at the mere fact that... it works. By the same token, the lower the price tag, within a certain product category, the fastest the complaints begin. Yet, most still find it hard to connect the dots between the price tag and the type of performance expected from a brand new computer.
A great point has been made most recently, with Microsoft’s announcement of its new Surface Book hybrid laptop. The Surface Book is a laptop that is designed to directly compete with the 13 inch Apple MacBook Pro.
Not only that: it comes with a price tag that is almost $300 higher than the Apple MacBook Pro. To drive the point home even further, Microsoft has decided to offer a version of the Surface Book, that packs a 1 Terabyte Solid State Drive, nVidia GPU, 6th gen Skylake CPU, and slap a $3000 tag on it.
The result: Microsoft’s own store ran out of Surface Books within a week.
The fact that the Surface Book’s sales skyrocketed so fast, was not a fluke. The obvious connection between quality and price, is a stronger point than providing lower-quality, yet “affordable” options, by cutting every possible corner, along the assembly line.
In simple terms, Microsoft Surface Book sold out because “it’s just that good”, and Microsoft has not been shy about it, just as Apple, the trend setter in this case, was never shy about showcasing products that would always be perceived as top-of-the-line, uncompromising blockbusters.
Of course, all of the above could be perceived as fan-boy ad-libbing, so let’s see if we can narrow it down to some more specific details. Incidentally, we have nine of them in our list, that are specific to the latest refresh of the Apple iMac Retina:
Cinematic experience
To refresh the latest iMac Retina, Apple has decided to implement a color standard that is used by the digital cinema industry, known as DCI P3, and dubbed as simply “P3” by Apple.
The standard requires technology to render colors that are a lot more realistic than on any other display. This can be verified by comparing primary colors as seen on an iMac Retina display, with the same shown on a regular sRGB display. the difference will be so staggering, it will make most users question their eyesight.
Whiter whites, without bleaching
Flat panel LCDs use white laps to render whites, and colored LEDs to make up the rest of the colors. This has two major disadvantages:
First of all , when using full brightness on a display, the LCD panel consumes way too much power, making the display much less energy efficient than it could be.
Secondly, using white lamps to render whites, affect the range of renderable colors, by restricting the percentage of colors visible by the naked eye.
With that in mind, Apple has come up with a solution, by creating its own red-green phosphor LEDs, making Retina displays on the new iMac the only one capable of displaying 99% of the previously mentioned P3 color space.
The Retina Display
If delivering 99% of P3 colors weren’t good enough, the Retina display is capable of delivering 100% of sRGB color space, whereas the majority of LCD displays can only go as far as 90%.
Cost of P3 technology
The cost of implementing a digital cinema standard in consumer products is not cheap. If it were, it would be everywhere, due to the dramatic difference in image quality it makes when watching video, playing games, or when editing high-resolution footage in production applications.
Apple is currently the only company capable of delivering P3 technology, at an affordable enough cost for consumers.
No two-timing controllers
Most computers on the market today, use a set of two display timing controllers, to handle the left and right side of the screen. This is what allows an LCD display to deliver a flicker-free experience at higher resolutions.
The Retina display, however, is no ordinary display, especially when requiring timing controllers to handle 4K and 5K resolutions, especially due to the fact that the native resolution on Retina displays requires 4 times as many pixels than on non-Retina displays.
Even the most powerful timing controllers available, are not enough to handle 14.7 million pixels at once, and things don’t get better, in 4K and 5K... with 8K in the pipeline within the next five years.
This is why Apple has decided to come up, once again, with its own solution, by creating its own proprietary single display timing controller.
Better contrast
Compared to other displays, the contract on the iMac’s Retina display represents a substantial improvement, as a result of using Apple’s own “Photo Alignment” process, which uses UV light to verify proper, and uniform alignment of each molecule on the TFT.
Color Calibration
Most displays enable users to calibrate monitors. While this is all well and good on monitors that do not support the same image quality as the Retina display, color calibration on an iMac Retina is largely pointless, as each iMac is subject to a color calibration process done directly in-house. The result is image quality that is absolutely, and verifiably identical, across every single iMac Retina.
Friction-Stir Welding
Aircraft manufacturers have come up with a special welding process that allow them to join airplane wing parts together, in a much stronger bond, called “Friction-Stir”. This is the same process used to fuse together the display and the chassis in the new iMac Retina. The process combines high heat and pressure, which causes aluminum to bond at a molecular level.
Fusion Drive
The Fusion Drive is an Apple-patented type of flash drive that is 2 and half times faster than the typical flash drive on competing devices, due to the fact that it uses a PCI Flash interface that is unique to this particular type of drive. the Fusion Drive is standard issue only on the two top-of-the-line iMac Retina desktops, and available as an optional upgrade on most iMac models.
The bottom line
The is only so much hype that can be built around a product, before it falls by its own shortcomings, and the reason why the iMac has outsold nearly every comparable product in its class, goes to show that, in spite of the rumors, iMacs are far from being overpriced. This is especially true when looking at how Microsoft is now on a similar path, building machines in which performance, craftsmanship and user experience is all that matters, no matter the cost.